An AI smart enough to speak at TED will win $4.5m

IBM's Watson computer is best known for winning Jeopardy against human opponents

Andrew Spear for The Washington Post via Getty Images

TED curator Chris Anderson just announced the world's biggest speaking fee - a $4.5m (£3.1m) cheque to be awarded to a speaker at the 2020 TED conference. There's just one catch: the speaker must be an artificial intelligence, which convinces the audience that it has mastered the art of the 18-minute TED talk.

The IBM Watson AI X Prize, announced on Wednesday at the TED conference in Vancouver, will offer $4.5 million to the team that develops an artificial intelligence showing "how humans can collaborate with powerful cognitive technologies to tackle some of the world’s grand challenges".

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Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation, said the winner would be chosen by the TED audience in 2020, when three finalists -- either AIs or AI human partnerships -- "come on stage to deliver jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring TED talks".

Standing alongside David Kenny, new head of IBM Watson, Diamandis said: "We're allowing teams to define their own challenge and come up and demonstrate what they've done." Interim prize money of an additional $500,000 will be awarded to teams between 2017 and 2020 as they compete at World of Watson, IBM’s annual conference. Successful teams will move to the next year's competition until they are whittled down to the final three.

The X Prize Foundation said: "We believe that cognitive technologies like Watson represent an entirely new era of computing, and that we are forging a new partnership between humans and technology that will enable us to address many of humanity’s most significant challenges -- from climate change, to education, to healthcare."

Peter Diamandis added that it was time to re-cast the story around AI. "Personally I'm sick and tired of the dystopian conversation around AI," he said.